The Endangered Species Act: 50 Years Later

Fifty years ago tomorrow, on December 28, 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law. Declaring that Congress had determined that “various species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the United States have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation,” the act provided for the protection of endangered species.

Just over a decade before, in 1962, ecologist Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring, documenting how pesticides designed to eliminate insects were devastating entire ecosystems of linked organisms. The realization that human destruction of the natural world could make the planet uninhabitable spurred Congress in 1970 to create the Environmental Protection Agency. And in 1973, when Nixon called for stronger laws to protect species in danger of extinction, 194 Democrats and 160 Republicans in the House—99% of those voting—voted yes. Only four Republicans in the House voted no.

 

Such strong congressional support for protecting the environment signaled that a new era was at hand. While President Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, tended to dial back environmental protections when he could in order to promote the development of oil and gas resources, President Jimmy Carter pressed the protection of the environment when he took office in 1977.

In 1978, Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as national monuments, doubling the size of the national park system. “These areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic and cultural value, and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world,” he said. In 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Oil companies, mining companies, timber companies, the cattle industry, and local officials eager for development strongly opposed Carter’s moves to protect the environment. In Alaska, local activists deliberately broke the regulations in the newly protected places, portraying Carter as King George III—against whom the American colonists revolted in 1776—and insisting that the protection of lands violated the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness promised in the Declaration of Independence.

For the most part, though, opposition to federal protection of the environment showed up as a drive to reform government regulations that, opponents argued, gave far too much power to unelected bureaucrats. In environmental regulations, the federal government’s protection of the public good ran smack into economic development.

In their 1980 presidential platform, Republicans claimed to be committed to “the conservation and wise management of America’s renewable natural resources” and said the government must protect public health. But they were not convinced that current laws and regulations provided benefits that justified their costs. “Too often,” they said, “current regulations are…rigid and narrow,” and they “strongly affirm[ed] that environmental protection must not become a cover for a ‘no-growth’ policy and a shrinking economy.”

In his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan explained that he wanted to see the U.S. produce more energy to fuel “growth and productivity. Large amounts of oil and natural gas lay beneath our land and off our shores, untouched because the present Administration seems to believe the American people would rather see more regulation, taxes and controls than more energy.”

In his farewell address after voters elected Reagan, Carter urged Americans to “protect the quality of this world within which we live…. There are real and growing dangers to our simple and our most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” he warned. “The rapid depletion of irreplaceable minerals, the erosion of topsoil, the destruction of beauty, the blight of pollution, the demands of increasing billions of people, all combine to create problems which are easy to observe and predict, but difficult to resolve. If we do not act, the world of the year 2000 will be much less able to sustain life than it is now.”

“But,” Carter added, “[a]cknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world—water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution if we tackle them with courage and foresight.”

Reagan began by appointing pro-industry officials James G. Watt and Anne M. Gorsuch (mother of Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch) as secretary of the interior and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, respectively; they set out to gut government regulation of the environment by slashing budgets and firing staff. But both resigned under scandal in 1983, and their replacements satisfied neither those who wanted to return to the practices of the Carter years nor those who wanted to get rid of those practices altogether.

Still, with their focus on developing oil and gas, when workers repairing the White House roof removed the solar panels in 1986, Reagan administration officials declined to reinstall them.

Forty years later, we are reaping the fruits of that shift away from the atmosphere that gave us the Endangered Species Act and toward a focus on developing fossil fuels. On November 30 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an agency of the United Nations, reported that global temperatures in 2023 were at record highs both on land and in the seas, Antarctic sea ice extent is at a record low, and devastating fires, floods, outbreaks of disease, and searing heat waves have pounded human communities this year. (...)

And yet the forces that undermined that spirit are still at work. In the 2022 West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency decision, the Supreme Court claimed that Congress could not delegate “major questions” to executive agencies, thus limiting the EPA’s ability to regulate the emissions that create climate change; and House Republicans this summer held a hearing on “the destructive cost of the Endangered Species Act,” claiming that it “has been misused and misapplied for the past 50 years” with “disastrous effects on local economies and businesses throughout the United States.” Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources Bruce Westerman (R-AR) accused the Biden administration of stifling “everything from forest management to future energy production through burdensome ESA regulations.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Image: NOAA

[ed. Early in my career I had the dubious distinction of being the Federal Oil and Gas Review Coordinator for the State of Alaska's only Fish and Wildlife agency, developing policy and mitigation measures for all federal oil and gas activities affecting the state. Early battles included things like leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, expanding North Slope oil development, drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas (which, among other things, would affect endangered bowhead whales), and responding to then Interior Secretary James Watt's accelerated OCS Leasing Program, which essentially put the entire Outer Continental Shelf adjacent to the state up for grabs over a short period of time ("area-wide leasing"). It was an intense and very busy time (for someone just in their late-20s!). For an excellent overview of the entire process and history see: Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Development in the Alaskan Arctic - Natural Resources Journal, (pdf):]

***

"A vital component of the ESA and another wildlife management statute, the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act of 1976 (FWCA)"' is the requirement that federal agencies consult with the appropriate wildlife protection agency"' regarding the wildlife impacts of a proposed activity. Though the FWCA requires consultation to ensure that "equal consideration"' 's  is given to wildlife values when undertaking federal actions, " it is the responsibility of the agency proposing the activity to determine whether it has complied with the act. The ESA consultation provision is more powerful, particularly since formal procedures for a highly structured process are established in the statute... During the section 1536 consultation, no "irreversible or irretrievable commitment of resources" can occur that would preclude the choice of alternative actions. 

By the time the D.C. Circuit court in October 1981 had issued its remand, James Watt had been appointed Secretary of the Interior by the Reagan administration. Earlier that year, Secretary Watt had already submitted his proposed five-year leasing schedule for 1982-1987 to Congress, " and after preparing more drafts to comply with the court's order, Watt approved his final, program in July 1982. Watt's "accelerated" leasing schedule planned to offer for lease nearly the entire OCS, almost 1 billion acres, which was 20 times the acreage offered by Andrus, and 25 times the acreage offered from 1953 to 1980. Forty-two lease sales were scheduled, with half of the acreage to be offered lying in the frontier area off of Alaska.

 "In addition to this drastic plan to lease nearly the entire OCS, Watt instituted fundamental changes to the leasing administrative process. The new "area-wide" leasing program replaced the former "tract selection" process by which the industry, states, and other groups nominated certain tracts within a large area to be included or deleted from a lease sale. The U.S. Geological Survey then narrowed the choice of tracts to those with the most promising hydrocarbon potential, and an environmental impact statement was prepared only for these tracts. Under the areawide system, Watt divided the United States' OCS into 18 large planning areas, ranging from 8 to 133 million acres, with lease sales offered annually in planning areas within the Gulf of Mexico and biennially elsewhere. An environmental impact statement is prepared for an entire OCS planning area, and information is gathered on industry interest and on other concerns which will determine the actual tracts to be offered, though the tracts are not determined until right before the sale. Tracks are also no longer evaluated prior to the lease sale to set a minimum bid, but are evaluated after bids are accepted based on the Secretary's revised system. Watt's area-wide leasing program was highly criticized22 except by the oil industry. Soon after Watt approved his leasing schedule, the state of Alaska, four other states, and several environmental organizations filed suit."

The Selfie Camera Has Gotten Too Good.

My New iPhone Is Making Me Look Uglier

This past spring, I participated in the sacred tradition that comes around once every few years: I got a new iPhone. The speaker on my old one had broken, forcing my hand. But let’s be clear. I didn’t care about the speaker. The real reason you upgrade an iPhone, of course, is to get a better camera.

Within a couple of weeks of unboxing my new iPhone 14 Pro, however, I noticed something odd happening. I’d take a selfie, think I looked great, and lock my phone, satisfied. Later, I’d open my camera roll to find that the same photo was different than I remembered. My skin no longer looked smooth, the way it had on my old phone, and even in the preview on my new one before I snapped the photo. Instead, every selfie seemed to intensify my imperfections. I could see the budding wrinkles on my 30-something forehead and the faint red glow of the eczema patches around my eyes. Startled, I began questioning my appearance. Then I began questioning my device.

Other new iPhone owners have done the same: “I’ve noticed that my skin looks awful on this new camera,” read one post on Reddit. A commenter complained that the iPhone 14 “turns you into [an] ugly panda with dark circles.” A woman on TikTok posted a plea, asking that someone from the Apple “community” please tell her “how to fix this raggedy colorless front camera.” Another called it a “travesty.” Hundreds of posts and comments across the internet complain about the selfie camera, and debate exactly what could be causing its problems. (...)

In recent years, complaints about the selfie camera seem to pop up whenever people upgrade their iPhones. The launch of the new iPhone 15 this fall seems to have set off another round of whining. A few models in particular—the 13, 14, and 15—dominate internet grumbling about how selfies now look too detailed (and worse, in the eyes of would-be posters). A recurring theme is also that selfies look better in the preview, before the person presses the shutter.

All three of these iPhones have a 12-megapixel front-facing camera, compared with the 7-megapixel lens on my old phone. But the reason that selfies are now so detailed isn’t because of megapixels. (The iPhone 12 also has a 12-megapixel selfie camera, but I haven’t seen many complaints about it.) Apple didn’t comment on what, if anything, might have changed beginning with the iPhone 13, but noted that the device has gotten more advanced at processing images after they are taken. An iPhone 14 and above can perform 4 trillion operations per photo to enhance the details and render a more natural skin tone, and not all of these changes are previewed in the Camera app before you press the shutter. The goal is to make your final photos as accurate as possible, Apple said. (...)

It’s hard to build a camera that’s just right. Five years ago, the iPhone presented the opposite problem. In 2018, Apple’s newly launched XR and XS models took photos that made people look suspiciously good. The phones were accused of artificially smoothing skin, in what came to be known as “beautygate.” Apple later said that a software bug was behind these unusually hot photos, and shipped a fix. “Do you want a nicer photo or a more accurate representation of reality?” Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, wrote in his review of the XR. “Only you can look into your heart and decide.”

The answer to Patel’s question seems to be that people want something in the middle—not too hot, but not too real either. People are chasing a Goldilocks ideal with the selfie camera: They want it to be real, authentic, and messy, just not too real, authentic, or messy.

“When someone thinks of a perfect selfie, they don’t think of having no pores,” Maria-Carolina Cambre, an education professor at Concordia University in Montreal, told me. “And they don’t think of having every single pore visible. It’s neither one of those extremes.” For more than years, Cambre and a colleague ran selfie focus groups in Canada, discussing the style of photography with more than 100 young people. They found that people examine selfies in a very specific way, which they termed the “digital-forensic gaze.” People inspect such images closely, pinching in to look for details and for evidence of any filtering. They look for flaws and inconsistencies. “This is the paradox,” she told me. “Everything is optimized, but the best selfies look like they haven’t been optimized. Even though they have.”

Every smartphone tackles this selfie challenge in a slightly different way. But because devices mediate so much of our self-perception at this point, switching them out can knock us off balance.

by Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Ben Kothe/The Atlantic. Source: Getty

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"I spent a morning perusing the Hemingway papers at the JFK Library in Boston and came upon this sketch of his from fishing off the coast of Havana."

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[ed. From the comments: Big Game fishing and IGFA records were a thing in Hemingway’s time. I wonder if that relates to record-catch submissions? The drying part may be to sumbit proof of the catch/species to IGFA officials (without sending in rotting flesh)?]

The Case of the Lego Bandit

On October 4, 2018, a young Frenchman named Louis came home from work to find the window in his front door smashed. A practical-minded 20-year-old with short dark hair, he figured it was just another petty crime in the rural outskirts of Paris, where he lived with his parents. But when he saw the familiar gleam of a tiny red plastic brick on the driveway, his stomach plunged. It was his Lego.

In brickspeak, Louis is an Adult Fan of Lego — known as AFOLs, for short — and among the most ardent. His grandmother gave him his first set, the Lego Clone Scout Walker, for his sixth birthday, igniting a singular passion that hasn't let up since. Under his handle Republicattak (the missing "c" a childhood misspelling that gnaws at him), he shares his custom Star Wars-themed builds on his YouTube channel. Unlike many aspiring influencers, he keeps his identity private, other than his first name, to avoid embarrassment at work. "Otherwise, it'll be very awkward," he tells me over Zoom in his thick French accent. "Because in my videos, I'm very much like, basically, a grown man playing with toys."

On that October day, his toys were everywhere. Colorful parts littered the walkway outside his house — a green baseplate here, a yellow sloped brick there. As Louis slowly followed the trail, he recognized chunks of his most beloved builds: a broken cockpit from his UCS X-Wing, the black treads ripped from his Clone Turbo Tank, a limbless Stormtrooper Minifigure staring helplessly from inside its helmet. "It was like a horror movie," he recalls, "but for Lego."

Though his parents were away, Louis feared the intruder might still be inside as he pushed open the broken front door. Nervously, he followed the trail of Lego to his bedroom. Since that first gift from his grandma, he'd painstakingly acquired, cataloged, and dusted ("just the dust," he tells me, is "terrible, painful work") more than 300 sets worth more than $20,000.

Now, his collection appeared to have been blasted by a Death Star Superlaser. Whole models had vanished, mint-condition boxes were ransacked, and scattered across the floor were the remnants of his most valuable builds.

His cash and laptops were untouched, but the Millennium Falcon his parents had given him was gone; so was the original Clone Scout Walker from his grandma. Most painful of all, the intruders had destroyed the massive, original Lego opus he'd been building over nights and long weekends for 10 months, a 35,000-piece installation he called "Imperial Gate."

"I really feel like the whole part of my stomach is missing," Louis recalls. "It is just so much that I'm just collapsing on the ground. I will just crush my head against the floor. Then I will just stand up and crush my head against the walls and just screaming. I will just run outside screaming. I will maybe scream for at least 10, 20 minutes."

That afternoon, he taped what he said was his final YouTube message. "I don't know what I'm going to do," he said into his cellphone camera, blinking back tears. "It really was my passion. That's the end of this channel."

Louis grew up in the Golden Age of Lego. The company, headquartered in the tiny Danish town of Billund, recently opened a Googleplex-like campus for its 2,000 employees. When I visited last year, the company had hoisted a King Kong-size, primary-colored Lego Minifigure at the entrance. In the lobby, a full-scale Lego Bugatti flashed its headlights. Fifteen million tourists a year flood the flagship Legoland theme park down the street, and a mile-long Lego factory runs around the clock, 361 days a year, churning out nearly 5 billion pieces a month. There are now more Minifigs in the world — 8.3 billion — than human beings.

The boom has also given rise to a multimillion-dollar secondary market for the most sought-after builds. Researchers at the Higher School of Economics in Russia found that from 1987 to 2015 Lego investments returned about 10% annually — better than stocks, bonds, gold, and collectible items like wine and stamps. A Space Command Center Lego set that sold for $25 in 1979 is worth over $10,000 today. "Investors in Lego generate high returns from reselling unpackaged sets, particularly rare ones, which were produced in limited editions or a long time ago," said Victoria Dobrynskaya, one of the study's authors.

But the big money in little bricks comes with a downside: crime. In 2012, the police arrested a 47-year-old Silicon Valley executive for tricking stores into giving him a discount on Lego sets and then reselling them on eBay. In 2015, a 46-year-old Florida man and his mother were convicted of stealing an estimated $2 million worth of Lego from Toys R Us stores from Maine to California. In 2020, thieves blasted through the warehouse wall of Fairy Bricks, a charity in England that donates Lego sets to sick kids at hospitals around the world, and absconded with $800,000 worth of bricks. That same year, police arrested three Polish suspects accused of robbing Lego toy stores across France as part of an international crime ring. Counterfeiting is even more lucrative: In Shanghai, the police recently broke up a crime syndicate accused of making and selling nearly $50 million in bogus Lego.

Before Louis' bricks were stolen, he had devoted every birthday and Christmas wish list, every euro he earned tending his parents' garden, to their accumulation. When his grandmother complained about the pieces littering his bedroom, he told her she couldn't blame him — she was the one who had introduced him to the hobby. At school, his obsession became a liability. "It became more difficult," he says. "I was looked at as the guy who does Lego still." (...)

From the outside, every subculture seems strange and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. AFOLs exist in an obsessive ecosystem of websites, TikToks, Instagrams, conventions, trading sites, black markets, newsletters, and competitions devoted to the cult of the brick. The most hardcore make a pilgrimmage to Billund, where the Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen cobbled together the first bricks 90 years ago. For many, building with Lego is an almost spiritual experience. "It's about having a mindset of always using the endless opportunities," says Esben Christensen, a 76-year-old who plays in the Lego marching band with his son. "It's about looking at what can I get out of these bricks."

Santiago Carluccio, a 32-year-old AFOL from Buenos Aires, Argentina, spent two years studying Danish and bought a one-way ticket to Billund with the hope of scoring a design job at the company. In the meantime, he's cooking poached salmon and sautéed pumpkin at the Mini Chef café, where robots serve meals in giant plastic bricks. "Lego is a part of how I'm built," he tells me.

Lego is well aware of the value of its adult fans; the company estimates that 20% of its sales are grown-ups buying sets for themselves. At its headquarters in the center of town, it maintains a Masterpiece Gallery of AFOL MOCs. A 50-foot Tree of Creativity, made of over 6 million pieces, soars up from the lobby. There are intricate Lego flowers, elaborate Lego Rube Goldberg machines, a broom-size pop-art Lego toothbrush achingly detailed down to the bristles. "One of our philosophies is to showcase the endless possibilities of the brick," Stuart Harris, the gallery's master builder, tells me as we gaze up at a 10-foot-tall orange-and-red Tyrannosaurus rex. He hands me a bag of six red bricks, noting that they can be snapped into 915 million combinations. "You might have something in your mind as to what you want to create," he says. "But then it's engineering: How am I going to do that? What kind of bricks and techniques am I going to use? It's the challenge that's fun and inspiring."

by David Kushner, Business Insider |  Read more:

Image: Mojo Wang

[ed. A miracle of modern engineering design and consistency. See also: How Lego Is Constructing the Next Generation of Engineers (Smithsonian).]

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Nominative Determinism

Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names. The term was first used in the magazine New Scientist in 1994, after the magazine's humorous "Feedback" column noted several studies carried out by researchers with remarkably fitting surnames. These included a book on polar explorations by Daniel Snowman and an article on urology by researchers named Splatt and Weedon. These and other examples led to light-hearted speculation that some sort of psychological effect was at work. Since the term appeared, nominative determinism has been an irregularly recurring topic in New Scientist, as readers continue to submit examples. Nominative determinism differs from the related concept aptronym, and its synonyms 'aptonym', 'namephreak', and 'Perfect Fit Last Name' (captured by the Latin phrase nomen est omen 'the name is a sign'), in that it focuses on causality. 'Aptronym' merely means the name is fitting, without saying anything about why it has come to fit.

The idea that people are drawn to professions that fit their name was suggested by psychologist Carl Jung, citing as an example Sigmund Freud who studied pleasure and whose surname means 'joy'. A few recent empirical studies have indicated that certain professions are disproportionately represented by people with appropriate surnames (and sometimes given names), though the methods of these studies have been challenged. One explanation for nominative determinism is implicit egotism, which states that humans have an unconscious preference for things they associate with themselves.

Background

In history, before people could gravitate towards areas of work that matched their names, many people were given names that matched their area of work. The way people are named has changed over time. In pre-urban times people were only known by a single name – for example, the Anglo-Saxon name Beornheard. Single names were chosen for their meaning or given as nicknames. In England it was only after the Norman conquest that surnames appear to have been used, with pre-Conquest individual relying on a number of bynames that were not hereditary, such as Edmund Ironside. Surnames were created to fit the person, mostly from patronyms (e.g., John son of William becomes John Williamson), occupational descriptions (e.g., John Carpenter), character or traits (e.g., John Long), or location (e.g., John from Acton became John Acton). Names were not initially hereditary; only by the mid-14th century did they gradually become so. Surnames relating to trades or craft were the first to become hereditary, as the craft often persisted within the family for generations. The appropriateness of occupational names has decreased over time, because tradesmen did not always follow their fathers: an early example from the 14th century is "Roger Carpenter the pepperer". (...)

Empirical evidence

Those with fitting names give differing accounts of the effect of their name on their career choices. Igor Judge, former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, said he has no recollection of anyone commenting on his destined profession when he was a child, adding "I'm absolutely convinced in my case it is entirely coincidental and I can't think of any evidence in my life that suggests otherwise." James Counsell on the other hand, having chosen a career in law just like his father, his sibling, and two distant relatives, reported having been spurred on to join the bar from an early age and he cannot remember ever wanting to do anything else. Sue Yoo, an American lawyer, said that when she was younger people urged her to become a lawyer because of her name, which she thinks may have helped her decision. Weather reporter Storm Field was not sure about the influence of his name; his father, Dr. Frank Field, also a weather reporter, was his driving force. Psychology professor Lewis Lipsitt, a lifelong collector of aptronyms, was lecturing about nominative determinism in class when a student pointed out that Lipsitt himself was subject to the effect since he studied babies' sucking behaviour. Lipsitt said "That had never occurred to me." Church of England vicar Reverend Michael Vickers, who denied being a Vickers had anything to do with him becoming a vicar, suggesting instead that in some cases "perhaps people are actually escaping from their name, rather than moving towards their job".

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt; Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil

[ed. Soo Yoo has to be my favorite.]

Still Dancing: Dick Van Dyke’s Charmed Career

My mother said I was a good boy—and now, at almost eighty-five years old…I guess I stayed that way,” Dick Van Dyke writes in his 2011 autobiography, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir.

The legendary comedian was the star of the transformative Dick Van Dyke Show, along with the long-running Diagnosis Murder and classic films like Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. His book delves into them—but much like the autobiographies of fellow legends Sophia Loren and Fred Astaire, it also keeps a lot close to the vest. Yet the people-pleasing star tells what he chooses with such good nature and gratitude that the reader hardly minds.

“I have endeavored to write the kind of book I think people want from me. It’s also the kind of book that I want from me,” Van Dyke writes by way of explanation. “But a word of warning about this book: If you are looking for dirt, stop reading now.”

This attitude is unsurprising for a man so universally beloved. “Nobody has a rotten thing to say about him,” Merv Griffin once said, “and they have rotten things to say about everyone.” A loving father of four, Democratic booster, and civil rights advocate, Van Dyke also volunteered for years every holiday at Los Angeles’s Midnight Mission, dancing, singing, and hugging unhoused folks on Skid Row.

But this wholesome boy had a dark side, fighting a lengthy battle with alcoholism. He recounts those low points with grace and light honesty. “Hope is life’s essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning,” Van Dyke writes. “I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning.” (...)

Put on a Happy Face

In 1942, Van Dyke signed up for the Air Force, and is refreshingly truthful recalling his relief that he was put in the special services. Instead of fighting, he was tasked with performing in variety shows, and even put up a DJ booth in the mess hall where he played records and read the news. “That was,” he writes, “about as military as I wanted to get.”

Some of the most fascinating and enjoyable parts of My Lucky Life are Van Dyke’s memories of his next 20 years as a drifting journeyman disc jockey, vaudeville performer, news reader, and local variety show host in the wild and wooly early days of radio and television. “The only certainty was that something would go wrong, if not today, then tomorrow,” he recalls. “It required nerves of steel and a sense of humor to match.” (...)

On-air disasters were frequent, like the time Van Dyke was interviewing a dog sled racer live. “I began clowning around and jokingly said, ‘Mush.’ It just came out of me. His dogs didn’t understand it was a joke and they took off. They ran through the kitchen set, the weather set, and two other sets, knocking all of them down, before they stopped.”

CBS let him go after three years, and Van Dyke was again drifting, appearing on talk and game shows. He was saved by becoming a regular on Pantomime Quiz, a charades-like TV show where he was paired with his pal Carol Burnett. “Thanks to a slew of imperceptible hand signals we came up with to tip each other off…we were unbeatable,” he writes. “It was a good thing, too. I needed the two hundred dollars we were paid each time we won to buy groceries.”

Paid to Play

The early 1960s changed everything, leading into Van Dyke’s golden era. In 1960, he was a smash in the Broadway hit Bye Bye Birdie, for which he won a Tony. In 1961, writer and creator Carl Reiner cast him in a new sitcom based on Reiner’s life as a comedy writer commuting from New Rochelle to New York City. Van Dyke was clearly as shocked as anyone that he got the role.

“I have…heard and read various accounts of why they liked me,” he writes. “My favorites? I wasn’t too good-looking, I walked a little funny, and I was basically kind of average and ordinary. I guess my lack of perfection turned out to be a winning hand.”

He was even more surprised when Reiner suggested naming it The Dick Van Dyke Show. So was his wisecracking costar Rose Marie. “Rosie, appearing more perplexed than anyone, shook her head and said, ‘What’s a Dick Van Dyke?’ I agreed. It sounded like a mistake. ‘Nobody’s ever heard of me,’ I said. ‘Who’s going to tune in?’”

They shot the pilot on January 21, 1961. Van Dyke paints his five seasons on the show as a collaborative, congenial wonderland of creativity, overseen by his hero Carl Reiner. “I often went into the set on Saturdays to work out little bits,” he writes. “I couldn’t turn my brain off, that’s how much fun I was having on the show.”

Now a beloved, Emmy-winning superstar, Van Dyke clung to his family life and eschewed the Hollywood party scene, much like his level-headed Mary Poppins costar Julie Andrews (whom he adored). But he couldn’t resist a little flirtation with his on-set wife, Mary Tyler Moore.

“We couldn’t stop giggling when we were around each other,” Van Dyke writes. “I finally asked a psychiatrist friend of mine about it. He stated what was patently obvious. ‘Dick, you’ve got a crush on her.’ I put my head in my hands and laughed. Of course, I did. Who didn’t adore Mary? If we had been different people, maybe something would have happened. But neither of us was that type of person. Still, we were stuck on each other.”

The Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O

An amateur philosopher and elder at his Presbyterian church, Van Dyke consistently tried to live up to its ideals of brotherly love. But his faith was shaken during a contentious church meeting regarding civil rights:

One of the elders emphatically stated that he did not want any black people in the church. Appalled, I stood up, shared my disgust, grabbed my jacket, and walked out. I never went back there or to any other church. My relationship with God was solid, but the hypocrisy among the so-called faithful finished me for good.

But Van Dyke admits he was not always so brave. “My dislike of confrontation was so obvious that Rosie turned it into a joke. She dubbed me ‘the Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O,’” he writes.

This aloofness meant many felt he was an unknowable enigma. “He’s a loner,” Carl Reiner once said. “You don’t see him hurting,” Mary Tyler Moore agreed. In My Lucky Life, Van Dyke addresses this depiction, revealing the anxiety and navel-gazing underneath his unflappable exterior.

“The public saw a smiling, nimble-footed performer while my family and friends were served up a more contemplative loner, a man who many said was hard to know,” he writes. “I will say that it was not intentional…. Throughout my whole life I have pondered the big questions. I’ve thought more like a philosopher…. If I was hard to know, it was because I would disappear into this abyss of questions and debate…. What was the point? What was I supposed to do? Was I getting it right?”

by Hadley Hall Meares, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Images: CBS Photo Archive/Getty; Earl Theisen Collection/Getty Images.

[ed. Lucky man. Seems like every bit the nice guy he's played all his life. Plus, he got to star opposite Mary Tyler Moore and Julie Andrews. How lucky is that? See also: 'My Whole Life Went Before Me' (People).]

Saved by Infinite Jest

In the surreal aftermath of my suicide attempt and amid the haze of my own processing, my best friend visited me in the hospital with a (soft-bound and thus mental-patient-safe) copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest under his arm. It was the spring of 2021. A couple months earlier, I had slipped in a tub, suffered a concussion, and triggered my first episode of major depression, and those had been the most difficult months of my life.

Though a lifelong ‘striver’ and ‘high achiever’, nothing I’ve ever done was harder than waging that war against myself while catatonic on that Brooklyn sofa. This was an inarticulable and so alienating war, one during which, at every moment, it was excruciating and terrifying to exist at all. I thought I knew the extent of my own mind’s capacity to torture itself, to hurt me, and what this thing we call depression can really be like. But I had been wrong.

For anyone who hasn’t experienced it at its worst, I now think it is psychologically impossible to imagine. It may even prove impossible for those who have experienced to still remember it after the fact, just as someone who temporarily perceives a fourth dimension wouldn’t really, fully remember what it was like once the perception is lost, only facets of the larger, unfathomable thing.

So maybe I can’t really remember, either: but I can recall thinking again and again these staggered reflections I’m writing now. Some of the swirling emotions that distressed and disoriented me on that sofa also remain faintly accessible, like the crippling inability to make any decisions, no matter how small, such that even contemplating a choice among some host of mine’s warmly offered selection of teas would incapacitate me with self-loathing and breathless, gushing tears. I remember hopelessly trying to make myself feel even the glimmer of anything good, turning to everything – the music, the friends – that had brought me so much joy before, only to find that I could no longer feel any of it but rather just, from somewhere afar, see and long for it while watching as the ever-darkening blackness in me instead consumed it all.

I remember the debilitating guilt and shame that emerged for everything I had ever done, including for having the audacity to keep existing for so long. And I remember an overwhelming empathy as I wondered how many others felt this way in the history of the world, imagining the vastness of all these solitary confinements within our minds across space and time. At the same time, it was unfathomable to me that anyone had ever felt like this, or that there could even be enough darkness in the universe to realise the experience more than this once.

From the days following my injury through the several months after, my ultimate challenge on that sofa was finding a way to endure the passage of time. I needed something to help me get through each moment and make it to the next one while still intact. I couldn’t actually do anything, but staring into space (or even watching TV) kept me vulnerable, as the cognitive passivity left ample room for the darkness to seep in and swallow me away. After a few desperate weeks, I eventually found that reading fiction – filling my head with another world that left room for little else – was the one thing that made it more bearable to exist. My best friend then suggested (after having gently and generously recommended the book to me for years) that perhaps this was the moment to read Infinite Jest. I think every day about how grateful I am that he did.

I started reading and it soon became the case that so long as Infinite Jest was in my hands, it was possible, okay even, for me to stick around. The core themes of the book that would soothe and sustain me over the coming weeks can be conveyed, I think, by its two dominant and contrasting venues – a halfway house for addicts in recovery on the one hand, and an elite and high-pressure tennis academy on the other – in conjunction with an underlying and unifying thesis: all of us, whether we’re chasing substances, achievements or whatever else we hope will satisfy us and make it bearable to exist, are afflicted. We are all, for lack of a better word, fucked in the head in the very same ways.

With Infinite Jest in my hands, I was suspended afloat by a contradictory catharsis, this evanescent insight that I could hold on to so long as I just kept reading and rereading the book’s (blessedly many) pages: that I was not crazy, nor alone, precisely because I really was crazy, which is to say that this all wasn’t me but rather it – it was a human condition. The book assured me that this was just what it was like to be crazy in this way, was exactly how others crazy in the same way were made to feel, a crazy that made them feel just as alone as I now felt. The book witnessed me, affirmed me, and assured me that my experience was familiar to the world. I can’t put it any better than just saying the book was my friend.

Some passages can only speak for themselves, as they so articulate (and help me remember) facets of the thing I was facing on that sofa. On the ‘psychotic depression’ suffered by the character Kate Gompert, the most haunting and compelling personification of depression I have come across:

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul … It … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency – sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying – are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

No description that I’ve encountered has better conveyed, so clearly and directly, the precise nature of that moment-by-moment agony in which I had found myself.

Infinite Jest’s most famous lines are on suicidality, and the air-tight logic that it brings along. The book analogises it to the choice faced by those trapped inside a burning building and deciding whether to jump:

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; ie, the fear of falling remains a constant … It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

The suicidal person, in other words, is not misguided but rather literally facing different choices – ones unimaginable to those who do not also have flames slowly engulfing them.

I don’t think I can really explain what reading all this meant to me. The book could see me like a mirror at that moment and describe it all right back. More concretely, I can’t explain what it meant to find such forceful validations of my particular sense of this ‘mental illness’, not as some wrong or irrational reaction by me, a misapprehension or miscalculation on my part, but rather as something happening to me; it was a thing inside me – a billowing shape, as the book often calls it – to which all my dread and despair was actually just the reasonable and appropriate response. But I can tell you that, once I finished Infinite Jest, my grip on this self-understanding – and so my self-preservation – quickly started to slip away, and it was only a few days later that I tried to kill myself. By then, I was back to being alone on that sofa, surrounded by those flames the book had managed to keep at bay. I think reading Infinite Jest had been keeping me alive. (...)

As of this September, it has been 15 years since Wallace’s suicide and two and a half years since my attempt. Like Wallace’s, my own decision to take my life had immediately followed an adjustment to my antidepressants. I remember it clearly: I’d been holding on so long as I’d still been reading, and when the reading was over and the enkindling darkness took its place, there was just barely enough left in me to pull myself up and pick up a phone, to articulate the necessary words and ask the professionals if they could possibly find some way to help me out. I’d still been searching in anguish for an escape as the walls closed in, a way to still win, to stick around.

Sadly, it was the prescribed dosage increase itself that hit me – as it is sometimes known to do – with another dark wave, knocking me back into the depths of myself, right as I’d been treading so very hard to reach a stable surface. I know Wallace’s suicide had been amid choppy chemical changes of his own, which is to say that we’d both still been fighting, and so these disparate outcomes were the product of random chance. There is a tragedy and humanity, I think, for one’s own desperate attempt at staying alive to be the very thing that does one in – and I admit to sometimes feeling guilty for being the one who found salvation in his book instead of him, as though this salvation was itself cosmically predestined to be scarce.

by Mala Chatterjee, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Martin O’Neill/Cutitout
[ed. A lot of people who've read Infinite Jest (even those who haven't) put it down for various reasons that I won't go into here. But there's no denying it was written by a mind operating at a different level. I read it during one of the most intensely depressive moments of my life too and can relate to all of this.]

Against Active Shooter Drills

We have a $2.7 billion industry devoted to causing the traumatization of children.

They refer to it as ‘active shooter drill training.’

I was initially motivated to write this when I saw a claim that the bipartisan gun deal allocated $5 billion in additional funding for causing childhood trauma. That turned out not to be the case (summaries of the deal from NPR, from CNN and from WaPo don’t mention it and it seems too big to have been overlooked if it was real), but these shooter drills are still traumatizing our children on a regular basis, which seems worth pointing out as another prime example of both our civilization losing its mind and also the existence of extremely low-hanging fruit.

As in, we could simply not traumatize our kids all the time for no reason. Crazy, I know.

For those who don’t know, an ‘active shooter drill’ is where they take young children who are forced by law to be at a given location each day, and periodically teach have them practice hiding and being shot at by a mass shooter.

If your response to that idea is ‘what, what, that sounds horrible and terrifying and we should absolutely positively not do that’ then you seem like a normal human to me.

If your response to that idea is ‘yes this will help protect our children’ then I do not understand you.

Yet these drills are required. Since school is also required, this is something the state is forcing on children. Children are being forced to report periodically for trauma. (...)

This Washington Post article has a variety of reactions to drills. Some of them are about how shameful it is that we have people shooting up schools in the first place, but mostly it’s about how these drills primary effect is clearly to traumatize students.

Yet this has ballooned into an industry, due to our demand to do something:

I do not need a study to say that this ‘may’ do more harm than good, and neither do you. (...)

One particular thing that was sometimes done was to have pretend gunmen roaming the halls firing blanks. I think we mostly realized not to do that.

There are also additional reasons to think drills are even worse than this.

• Drills teach children that they live in a world where deadly school shootings are are something they should expect to happen in their lives, which they aren’t. This functions to put the idea of shooting up a school closer to top of mind and to normalize it as a choice. It lets disturbed kids at risk of doing this see what it would look like, and maybe discover they like it, or that other kids deserve it.

• I propose that traumatized kids, kids who despise their schools for damn good reason, or those who are constantly among others with trauma, are going to more often choose to do crazy horrible things like shoot up the school.

• Drills show potential shooters exactly how everyone will react. This alone plausibly allows them to plan the most effective response measures in ways that more than nullify any benefits from the drill.

• Drills teach children exactly how much the system and the adults around them care about them. They’ll respond accordingly.

• Drills, preparing for drills, dealing with the aftermath of drills and all the resulting focus on such matters takes a lot of time away from learning, to the extent that was a thing school was trying to do.

What to do about this?

On a civilization level, we should stop doing this. At minimum we should do less traumatic versions of it, ideally stop causing trauma for no reason.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Images: Twitter/X

[ed. Absolutely. We're normalizing the abnormal. See also: Something Was Wrong (DWV). And if that's not enough to make kids more stressed, depressed and neurotic we have the new concept of 'Gentle Parenting', which just sounds like the old concept of helicoptering.]

via:

Quentin Monge

via:

Fentanyl Super Labs in Canada Pose New Threat for U.S.

At a rural property an hour outside Vancouver in October, Canadian police found 2.5 million doses of fentanyl and 528 gallons of chemicals in a shipping container and a storage unit. Six months earlier, they raided a home in a cookie-cutter Vancouver subdivision packed with barrels of fentanyl-making chemicals, glassware and lab equipment.

Thousands of miles away outside Toronto, police in August found what is believed to be the largest fentanyl lab so far in Canada – hidden at a property 30 miles from the U.S. border crossing at Niagara Falls, N.Y.

U.S. authorities say they have little indication that Canadian-made fentanyl is being smuggled south in significant quantities. But at a time when record numbers of people are dying from overdoses in the United States, the spread of clandestine fentanyl labs in Canada has the potential to undermine U.S. enforcement efforts and worsen the opioid epidemic in both nations.

Investigators in Canada say the labs are producing fentanyl for domestic users and for export to Australia, New Zealand and, they assume, the United States.

“It’d be hard to believe it’s not occurring,” said Philip Heard, commander of the organized crime unit for police in Vancouver, a city hard-hit by fentanyl overdose deaths. “Most police leaders I’ve spoken to believe our production outstrips what our domestic demand is.”

The Canadian labs are a curveball for U.S. authorities whose efforts to combat fentanyl are focused on the southern border with Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has installed about $800 million worth of powerful scanning and detection equipment at land border crossings since 2019. Nearly all that technology has been deployed along the U.S. southern border, where CBP confiscated nearly 27,000 pounds of fentanyl during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the most ever.

Republican lawmakers in recent months have called for U.S. military strikes in Mexico targeting fentanyl traffickers and drug labs. The spread of fentanyl production to Canada suggests traffickers there are poised to benefit if Mexican suppliers get squeezed. The lightly-patrolled U.S.-Canada border spans more than 5,500 miles – the longest international boundary between two nations in the world – and has few physical barriers.

One candidate seeking the GOP presidential nomination, Vivek Ramaswamy, has proposed building a wall along the U.S. northern border, citing the threat of fentanyl smuggling from Canada. But the appearance of the Canadian labs has generated little reaction in Washington, where the U.S.-Mexico border remains the focus of the fentanyl debate.

The powerful, intensely addictive drug and other synthetic opioids claim more than 70,000 lives a year in the United States. A similar proportion of Canadians are dying of overdoses – about 7,000 annually. The two countries remain the only nations where fentanyl poses such a lethal threat.

CBP seized just two pounds of fentanyl along the northern border during the 2023 fiscal year, the agency’s latest statistics show.

“We are not seeing any sort of southbound flow of fentanyl into the United States from Canada,” said Robert Hammer, the top Homeland Security Investigations agent in Seattle, who said he consulted with his fellow agents in Buffalo and Detroit.

“That’s not to say it’s not happening, and not to say it may not happen in the future,” Hammer cautioned.

Hammer said he remains skeptical Canadian-made fentanyl will displace the pills flooding into the United States from Mexico. “We are down to 45 cents a pill on the wholesale side here in Seattle,” he said. “You have to be pretty damn competitive to beat 45 cents a pill to compete with the Mexican cartels that have entrenched themselves with the distribution network they have set up here in the Pacific Northwest.”

Still, authorities in the United States and Canada are investigating the robust trade links between the countries, routes that provide ample opportunities for smuggling. In October, the Treasury Department issued sanctions against a Vancouver company that purports to sell beverage industry supplies, alleging it was a distributor of illicit precursor chemicals and equipment and sought to obtain from China nearly 3,000 liters of chemicals used to make fentanyl, heroin and meth. The company’s owner has denied the allegations.

Drug experts have long warned that a crackdown along the U.S.-Mexico border could prompt criminal groups to seek alternative sources or begin producing fentanyl in the United States. Most of the labs encountered in the United States are what police agencies refer to as “pill press” operations, where traffickers make tablets out of fentanyl powder smuggled from Mexico.

The super labs that police are finding in Canada differ because they are synthesizing the drug – not merely pressing pills – using precursor chemicals sourced primarily from China. (...)

Derek Westwick, who runs the Royal Canadian Mounted Police unit in British Columbia responsible for stopping precursor chemicals and finding drug labs, said his team has busted 10 operations in Western Canada – in isolated rural areas and dense urban neighborhoods. “The only common thread is they’re always rental properties,” Westwick said, explaining that leased properties are generally protected from seizure by law enforcement.

Police say the fentanyl labs have spread eastward from British Columbia – into Alberta and now Toronto.

In the Toronto area in 2020, what started as a large-scale investigation into meth labs uncovered a large-scale fentanyl pill pressing operation. Investigators seized nearly 124,000 counterfeit pain pills and 70 kilograms of fentanyl powder.

By August, police concluded a separate investigation known as Project Odeon, which was sparked by an overdose death two years earlier in Hamilton, just outside Toronto. Investigators discovered a dismantled fentanyl lab and an active one at a rural Hamilton home. They seized 3.5 tons of chemical byproduct from fentanyl production, 800 gallons of chemicals used to make the opioid and more than 25 kilograms of finished fentanyl.

Ontario Police Detective Inspector Lee Fulford said the lab had the capacity to churn out 20 to 30 kilograms of fentanyl weekly. “It’s alarming that much fentanyl would be hitting the streets of Toronto,” said Fulford, of the Organized Crime Enforcement Bureau.

Authorities charged 12 people, including a Toronto physician. Hamilton police officials said they identified a U.S. company that had sold three pieces of lab equipment, although they did not name the company.

by David Ovalle and Nick Miroff, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Vancouver Police Department

[ed. Supply vs. Demand. $.45/pill? Lots to unpack here (eg. why not name the company?), and another wall? Across Canada. Really?]

Off His Royal Tits

Penguins​ are super-parents. When the female provides dinner she doesn’t just reach for the pesto but launches herself into the treacherous, icy depths, returning with a stomach full of half-digested fish to be spewed down the gullet of her needy chick, His Fluffy Eminence, who is then installed in a creche so protective it makes the average nursery look like the workhouse in Oliver Twist. Yet, even for penguins, rejection comes: after the winter huddling and the pre-fledge commutes, the deep dives and the exhausting feeds, the mother will waddle off across the tundra, never to be seen by her children again. Abandonment, we understand, is not the deranging catastrophe that wrecks the child’s system of trust, but the crowning achievement of good parenting.

Humans tend to take the whole waddling away thing quite badly. ‘When a child feels abandoned,’ D.W. Winnicott writes in The Child, the Family and the Outside World, he

becomes unable to play, and unable to be affectionate or to accept affection. Along with this, as is well known, there can be compulsive erotic activities. The stealing of deprived children who are recovering can be said to be part of the search for the transitional object, which had been lost through the death or fading of the internalised version of the mother.

We can’t be sure of the effect of the lost mother on the king penguin, but we can be in no doubt that it matters greatly to England’s royal family. In his essay ‘The Place of the Monarchy’, Winnicott helps us gain traction on the problem: ‘It is in the personal inner psychic reality that the thing is destroyed,’ he writes. And later:

Whereas a monarchy can be founded on a thousand years of history, it could be destroyed in a day. It could be destroyed by false theory or by irresponsible journalism. It could be laughed out of existence by those who only see a fairy story or who see a ballet or a play when really they are looking at an aspect of life itself.

Prince Harry’s mother died when he was twelve years old, and his search for the transitional object has been messed up ever since. In Tom Bradby’s interview with him for ITV, after Harry describes the crash in Paris he immediately speaks of not wanting the same thing to happen to his wife. ‘Shooting, shooting, shooting,’ is the way this ex-soldier describes the actions of the paparazzi that night. He has always believed that Diana was murdered by careless journalists pursuing her for personal profit, and he wants to get rid of these death-eaters before they get anywhere near his wife and children. Journalism for him is a profession opposed to truth. This seems so obvious to him that it acts as a gateway drug to everything else he believes. The art of biography appears to the prince to be a pane of clear glass through which the truth will finally be revealed to the reader. So here it comes: The Corrections by Harry Windsor, a postmodern social novel in which the author will confront the twisted evils that harass civilisation and be a living antidote to the poison spread by the Daily Mail. It’s an impressive scheme of outrage. Harry’s truth is a cartoon strip of saucy entertainments and shouty jeremiads masquerading as a critique of the establishment, and it simply couldn’t be more riveting. His truth – ‘my truth’ – is much better written than the Mail, though guddling in the same sad bogs on the same dark heaths of human experience. Really funny, though. We find him losing his virginity to a horsey woman round the back of a pub. We find him staying up half the night at Eton smoking smuggled-in weed. One time, he takes acid and is so off his royal tits he thinks he’s having a chat with a toilet seat. Another time, his cock nearly drops off at the South Pole when it gets frostbitten. He gets decked by his brother and falls onto a dog bowl, but doesn’t punch him back. Truth is everywhere. Truth is relentless. Truth is a noisy neighbour who just swallowed four disco biscuits and dragged his sound system into the garden for a bit of a social. What’s not to like?

In a world of royal enchantment, competitive PR, national myth-making and pure lies, the truth – if played loud enough – can seem like a human right eclipsing all others, and Harry has worked himself up to the point where truth is life and life is truth. (He’s been in California for a while. He’ll get over it when the tax bill arrives.) The mantra comes towards you waving glow sticks. Harry will allow no contradiction and no variance – ‘Recollections may vary,’ the late queen said – and only when his wider family shows that it ‘deeply appreciates’ the truth of what he’s gone through will ‘reconciliation’ be possible. Harry says, in his Montecito meets TikTok kind of way, that ‘forgiveness is 100 per cent a possibility,’ and that he’s ‘open’ to helping the royal family understand its own unconscious bias. It must be quite annoying, if you’re them. You don’t have to be Baudrillard to feel that Harry’s idea of the truth is simplistic, and that he’s become a bit of a fundamentalist: anything that isn’t ‘my truth’ is automatically part of the big lie. Harry has set out to convince the world that his family are professional liars, with one or two saving graces, such as heavenly anointment. And he’s not wrong.

Diana died in the full glare of the cameras, and Harry and his brother were forced to mourn her in that same light, an experience believed, in the popular mind, to be something that would bind them together for ever. It actually served to cast them out of each other’s sphere as they searched separately for their mother. Their father, a cultured, adult man in a permanent foetal crouch, couldn’t comfort them or share their feelings or join them in trying to alter the future.

Pa and I mostly coexisted. He had trouble communicating, trouble listening, trouble being intimate face to face. On occasion, after a long multi-course dinner, I’d walk upstairs and find a letter on my pillow. The letter would say how proud he was of me for something I’d done or accomplished. I’d smile, place it under my pillow, but also wonder why he hadn’t said this moments ago, while seated directly across from me ... Pa confessed around this time that he’d been ‘persecuted’ as a boy ... I remember him murmuring ominously: I nearly didn’t survive. How had he? Head down, clutching his teddy bear, which he still owned years later. Teddy went everywhere with Pa.

In this fierce toboggan ride of a book, Harry never says that his mother is dead, only that she has ‘disappeared’. Photographs, images, pieces in the press, the proofs of his and his family’s specialness, are what obsess him and drive him into a spiral of confusion as he fights for control of his life. I would say, right off, that when a mother dies so publicly and so violently, the fight is likely to be with the sibling. Nobody actually shares their parent – that’s just an illusion – and even the healthiest of brothers are parrying with wooden swords. Each child wants to go back, fighting off all monsters, all observers and opportunists, all lovers and all brothers, to be alone with her again.

There has never been a book like this, with its parcelling out of epic, one-sided truths. Most royal biographies, even the lively ones – his mother’s, his father’s, poor old Crawfie’s – were made airless by vapid writing, spurious genuflections before royal protocol, cringing vanity masquerading as public service. Harry does much less of that. He goes in for a Las Vegas-style treatment of the royal problem, with multiple sets, many costumes and guest appearances by everybody from Carl Jung to Elton John. There are overshared war experiences, bouts of snotty complaining, daddy issues, mummy issues, brother issues, bedroom-size issues, whose-palace-is-it-anyway issues, arguments about tiaras, Kate Middleton issues and todger-nearly-dropping-off-in-Harley-Street issues. Harry notarises his pees, his poos, his sweat and his bonks. He reveals the duff present his auntie Margaret gave him for Christmas (‘I was conversant with the general contours of her sad life’). He calls his brother bald. He has trouble showing affection without its being excessive (he hugs his therapist after one session, FedEx-ing the transference before session three) and barely introduces a person into the narrative before shortening their name and making them a ‘legend’. So, we have Chels, Cress, Euge and other colourfully abbreviated lives. Harry wants to love. He wants purpose. He’s nobody’s ‘spare’. He can never quite say it out loud, and neither could his aunt Margaret, but he’s pissed about being number two, and he takes all the unfairness and makes of it a Molotov cocktail. Take that, Camilla! Take that, courtiers and royal correspondents! Take that, Pa, from your ‘darling boy’! You can’t help agreeing with him half the time; the other half is spent worrying how he’ll ever make it through his life, as he mistakes his need to end his pain with the need for a global reset.

by Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Good Morning America

[ed. Missed this earlier this year, but with Harry's court case against the Mail recently resolved thought it would still be of some interest. Terrific review.]

Effective Obfuscation

As Sam Bankman-Fried rose and fell, people outside of Silicon Valley began to hear about “effective altruism” (EA) for the first time. Then rifts emerged within OpenAI with the ouster and then reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman, and the newer phrase “effective accelerationism” (often abbreviated to “e/acc” on Twitter) began to enter the mainstream.

Both ideologies ostensibly center on improving the fate of humanity, offering anyone who adopts the label an easy way to brand themselves as a deep-thinking do-gooder. At the most surface level, both sound reasonable. Who wouldn’t want to be effective in their altruism, after all? And surely it’s just a simple fact that technological development would accelerate given that newer advances build off the old, right?

But scratching the surface of both reveal their true form: a twisted morass of Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, inflated egos, and greed.

Same as it always was.

Effective altruism

The one-sentence description of effective altruism sounds like a universal goal rather than an obscure pseudo-philosophy. After all, most people are altruistic to some extent, and no one wants to be ineffective in their altruism. From the group’s website: “Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” Pretty benign stuff, right?

Dig a little deeper, and the rationalism and utilitarianism emerges. Unsatisfied with the generally subjective attempts to evaluate the potential positive impact of putting one’s financial support towards — say — reducing malaria in Africa versus ending factory farming versus helping the local school district hire more teachers, effective altruists try to reduce these enormously complex goals into “impartial”, quantitative equations.

In order to establish such a rubric in which to confine the messy, squishy, human problems they have claimed to want to solve, they had to establish a philosophy. And effective altruists dove into the philosophy side of things with both feet. Countless hours have been spent around coffee tables in Bay Area housing co-ops, debating the morality of prioritizing local causes above ones that are more geographically distant, or where to prioritize the rights of animals alongside the rights of human beings. Thousands of posts and far more comments have been typed on sites like LessWrong, where individuals earnestly fling around jargon about “Bayesian mindset” and “quality adjusted life years”.

The problem with removing the messy, squishy, human part of decisionmaking is you can end up with an ideology like effective altruism: one that allows a person to justify almost any course of action in the supposed pursuit of maximizing their effectiveness.

Take, for example, the widely held belief among EAs that it is more effective for a person to take an extremely high-paying job than to work for a non-profit, because the impact of donating lots of money is far higher than the impact of one individual’s work. (The hypothetical person described in this belief, I will note, tends to be a student at an elite university rather than an average person on the street — a detail I think is illuminating about effective altruism’s demographic makeup.) This is a useful way to justify working for a company that many others might view as ethically dubious: say, a defense contractor developing weapons, a technology firm building surveillance tools, or a company known to use child labor. It’s also an easy way to justify life’s luxuries: if every hour of my time is so precious that I must maximize the amount of it spent earning so I may later give, then it’s only logical to hire help to do my housework, or order takeout every night, or hire a car service instead of using public transit.

The philosophy has also justified other not-so-altruistic things: one of effective altruism’s ideological originators, William MacAskill, has urged people not to boycott sweatshops (“there is no question that sweatshops benefit those in poor countries“, he says). Taken to the extreme, someone could feasibly justify committing massive fraud or other types of wrongdoing in order to obtain billions of dollars that they could, maybe someday, donate to worthy causes. You know, hypothetically.

Other issues arise when it comes to the task of evaluating who should be prioritized when it comes to aid. A prominent contributor to the effective altruist ideology, Peter Singer, wrote an essay in 1971 arguing that a person should feel equally obligated to save a child halfway around the world as they do a child right next to them. Since then, EAs have taken this even further: why prioritize a child next to you when you could help ease the suffering of a better child somewhere else? Why help a child next to you today when you could instead help hypothetical children born one hundred years from now? Or help artificial sentient beings one thousand years from now?

The focus on future artificial sentience has become particularly prominent in recent times, with “effective altruists” emerging as one synonym for so-called “AI safety” advocates, or “AI doomers”. Despite their contemporary prominence in AI debates, these tend not to be the thoughtful researchers who have spent years advocating for responsible and ethical development of machine learning systems, and trying to ground discussions about the future of AI in what is probable and plausible. Instead, these are people who believe that artificial general intelligence — that is, a truly sentient, hyperintelligent artificial being — is inevitable, and that one of the most important tasks is to slowly develop AI such that this inevitable superintelligence is beneficial to humans and not an existential threat.

This brings us to the competing ideology:

Effective accelerationism

While effective altruists view artificial intelligence as an existential risk that could threaten humanity, and often push for a slower timeline in developing it (though they push for developing it nonetheless), there is a group with a different outlook: the effective accelerationists.

This ideology has been embraced by some powerful figures in the tech industry, including Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, who published a manifesto in October in which he worshipped the “techno-capital machine” as a force destined to bring about an “upward spiral” if not constrained by those who concern themselves with such concepts as ethics, safety, or sustainability.

Those who seek to place guardrails around technological development are no better than murderers, he argues, for putting themselves in the way of development that might produce lifesaving AI.

This is the core belief of effective accelerationism: that the only ethical choice is to put the pedal to the metal on technological progress, pushing forward at all costs, because the hypothetical upside far outweighs the risks identified by those they brush aside as “doomers” or “decels” (decelerationists).

Despite their differences on AI, effective altruism and effective accelerationism share much in common (in addition to the similar names). Just like effective altruism, effective accelerationism can be used to justify nearly any course of action an adherent wants to take.

by Molly White, Citation Needed |  Read more:

Image: Christina Animashaun, Vox: How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force
[ed. See also: The religion of techno-optimism (Disconnect - excerpt below); also, It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly (New Yorker); and, The Year Millennials Aged Out of the Internet (NYT).]

"The expectation of ultimate salvation through technology, whatever the immediate human and social costs, has become the unspoken orthodoxy, reinforced by a market-induced enthusiasm for novelty and sanctioned by a millenarian yearning for new beginnings. This popular faith, subliminally indulged and intensified by corporate, government, and media pitchmen, inspires an awed deference to the practitioners and their promises of deliverance while diverting attention from more urgent concerns. Thus, unrestrained technological development is allowed to proceed apace, without serious scrutiny or oversight — without reason. Pleas for some rationality, for reflection about pace and purpose, for sober assessment of costs and benefits — for evidence even of economic value, much less larger social gains — are dismissed as irrational. From within the faith, any and all criticism appears irrelevant, and irreverent."   ~ David Noble, The Religion of Technology.

I just want to remind you, Noble was writing this in 1997, yet it still feels like a current and deeply relevant commentary. As usual when reading about the history of tech criticism, it shows how the problems we face with the tech industry today are not new at all, but as the power and wealth of its corporate leaders has expanded in recent decades, the threat they pose has grown immensely. 

Meanwhile in the Moscow metro...

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Tokyo, 2023 (jade)
via: here, here, here, here 

Fresco fragment from Nemausus
Roman, 2nd century AD

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Perfect Day

Oh No, Kellyanne Conway Just Described My Perfect Day (The Mary Sue)

Since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump’s name could not appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot, conservative media has been pitching a fit over the decision. That includes Trump’s always terrible former senior counselor-turned-Fox News personality, Kellyanne Conway. (...)

“I just think the Democrats wake up every morning, Emily, and they look at the calendar, the iPhone says January 6, 2021—the date never changes,”... “And then they get in an electric vehicle and go get an abortion. I just described the Democratic Party in seven seconds. That’s it. That’s what I see. But it’s always January 6.”

Image: Barbie

[ed. Crazy little Kellyanne. Still incoherent as ever, but now a Fox News "personality".]